Alexander Lamont Bishop is the Interim Executive Director of INTBAU (the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism), where he leads a global network dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional building skills, architecture, and urbanism. With over a decade of experience in heritage and cultural preservation, Alexander previously served as Deputy Secretary General of the International National Trusts Organization (INTO), where he spearheaded initiatives that raised over $3 million for global heritage projects. His work has consistently focused on supporting heritage sites and building capacity within the cultural sector in the UK and globally, making him a leading advocate for traditional craftsmanship in the modern built environment.
On Wednesday, Oct. 16 at noon, Alexander will join us for a virtual talk with PPS members and the public. During his presentation, he will discuss the challenges of launching and running these global programs – touching on curriculum development, funding and reaching the right audience – and will discuss successful examples of summer school training programs in Europe and the Americas, including Belgium, Spain, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, and Mexico. Discover how these efforts are preserving cultural heritage and shaping the next generation of skilled traditional practitioners by registering for this event here.
How would you describe INTBAU to someone who’s never heard of it before?
INTBAU was founded 25 years ago by then Prince, now King, His Majesty King Charles III. We use traditional or vernacular architecture as a reference point for our work, contributing to the beauty and also practicality and dignity of a place.
You move through Providence or London or Johannesburg or Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, and you move through the same coffee shop to the same hotel to the same pavements — we call them pavements, but you call them sidewalks — and everything is globalized in what I would consider to be the worst possible way. There’s a uniformity to the world that we live in, which is because things are all following a centralized, globalized architectural and urbanist standard — INTBAU exists in opposition to that. We believe that places should be informed by the environment that they come from. That’s a sustainability question, but it’s also a question of place: What makes a place? How do you know that you went to visit England or Mozambique or Colombia or wherever you went, if you pass through the same environments exactly when you go there?
One thing I think we’re really interested in is the global aspect of INTBAU. How many chapters do you have globally?
We’ve just broken 40; the most recent one we signed up is Austria. Each chapter operates in a national environment and acts as a place where the people interested in this theme can come together and run different programs. Some are more active than others, but the overarching expectation of a chapter is that each one is engaging the sector and the public in their local country.
We skew professional as a network, so chapters are mostly talking to people who work within architecture and urbanism. There’s some overlap into the space that you in the States would call the preservation sector. That’s not the primary preoccupation, but when that overlap happens particularly — as we’re going to talk about at the event — in the craft space. Because clearly, craft is needed to preserve; it’s also needed for new building if you want to build in a traditional style.
Many of our global chapters run education programs, with senior urbanists and architects as well as others from the sector, who are really keen that the traditional is not left out of people’s education, which has been the case historically. To my knowledge, there are two universities globally where one can do a bachelor’s in traditional or vernacular architecture. One is Notre Dame in Indiana. And there’s just been a new one inaugurated this September in Norway — our chapter was heavily involved in its creation. But that’s the sum total of places where you can do a bachelor’s degree explicitly in traditional architecture.
But students are really hungry for this content. Some, of course, are really interested in modernism, and are well taken care of within the existing educational system, but there are many students who are interested in understanding how things have been built, traditionally, since time immemorial, in the places where they live.
That is what has led to the birth of all of our summer schools, with many chapters operating their own programs. Not every chapter has one, clearly — INTBAU Poland, for example, doesn’t run a summer school, but they quite often run workshops. But a growing number do offer a summer school of some kind, and that is all about addressing a need where students really want to engage with the traditional, the vernacular, the sustainable and are offered limited opportunities to do so by typical means.
What are some of the coolest global projects that INTBAU has been involved in over the years?
INTBAU has chapters and professional members. Between the two, parts of the INTBAU network have been involved in some of the most high profile new urbanism projects globally. These range from touchstone sites like Poundbury in the UK and Brandevoort in the Netherlands to newer developments like the Prince’s Quarter in Sydney or Cayalá in Guatemala.
In the UK, the touchstone site is probably Poundbury, an extension of an existing historic town called Dorchester, which is incidentally where my family’s from. The project development is led by the Duchy of Cornwall, with the keen endorsement of King Charles III when he was Duke of Cornwall [before coming to the throne].
It’s a big development and construction is ongoing — there are 2,000 or 3,000 dwellings so far. But when it was first created, let’s just say the reception in the British press was mixed. Now, 20 or 30 years later, I’m pleased to report that a lot of those views are changing.
When reacting to a place like Poundbury, I think the mistake that commentators make is to — because the style reminds them of something old — compare it to Dorchester next door, which is an historic market town. Dorchester can trace its history back more than 2,000 years old, with the Roman town having been founded in 70 AD. The temptation is to compare Poundbury to Dorchester, which has got millennia, literally, of history in which to develop its sense of place. In my view, that’s quite unfair.
Now, in my opinion, what they should be comparing Poundbury to is our [the UK’s] version of American sprawl. They are often called estates when they’re built, and I would categorize the worst of them as featureless, uninteresting, uninspired developments that could be anywhere in the country — could be, in some ways, anywhere in the world. In these cases the relevance and importance of Poundbury and other developments like it are much more evident.
I don’t want to give you the impression that we’re only interested in European classical architecture at INTBAU. The architecture and urbanism we champion doesn’t need to look like traditional British or European styles of architecture; it needs to be informed by what’s happening locally in that country or area.
For example, our Mexican chapter runs a summer school in Izamal, which is just outside of Mérida in Yucátan. It’s a Mayan town with Mayan architecture in an area where the Mexican government has huge plans for new development. Our chapter is interested in how they can expand Izamal in a way that is in context with its Mayan character and reflects local traditions: Mayan architecture uses local materials; it is going to be by nature more flood resistant, with better temperature regulation for that particular climate. We believe that this is the kind of thing that we should be building.
Similarly, our small grants program has been supporting the Indian firm Mason’s Ink, based in Bangalore, in their work with a community of women workers, empowering them with the knowledge and expertise necessary to become proficient in traditional building methods so that these may continue to be used in that part of India. Local construction techniques will almost always be a much better solution from an environmental perspective than concrete and the result also reflects the traditions and culture of that area.
How has climate change impacted the work that you guys do?
Climate change is at the center of what we’re talking about. New urbanism is needed, and we can’t hide from the fact that people need places to live. But if we’re going to reduce our impact on the planet and the subsequent climate change impact, then we have to use local materials. We have to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to heat and cool our places of residence and work.
What’s really striking is that when you talk to people in different geographies about the way in which they have traditionally dealt with the climate, they all have their own inventive, interesting solutions. I mean, there’s something like in the American South, someone sitting out on their veranda while wind moved through the house and they fanned themselves — that’s what life looked like before we started to rely on air conditioning all the time. In other places like Cairo or Iran, for example, they used to have these incredible tunnels that funneled the wind coming into the city in such a way that it cooled the whole house down. In Bermuda where there is very limited fresh water, all traditional houses have a rainwater collection system built into their roofs.
Every geography has its own vernacular, traditional way of using local materials and building for the climate that it’s in. We’ve increasingly abandoned those things, and lost them as we’ve moved to a fossil fuel dependent structure. If we now want to move away from our dependence on fossil fuels — which we do — then we need to rediscover the traditional and re-elevate them in our estimation.
Lastly, I want to ask, how did you get into this kind of work?
On a personal level, why did I get into it? I believe quite strongly in what I was talking about before. I’ve been very fortunate through my career to travel a lot, visiting sites of heritage, visiting culture, seeing cultural resources in lots of parts of the world. And I feel strongly that we don’t want to move to a world where cities look the same wherever you are, or towns look the same wherever you are. I don’t want to walk into a coffee shop in Buenos Aires, and feel like I could be in Bristol.
That means we have to be uplifting not only of traditional architecture, but of culture, because the traditional is rooted in culture. Preserving cultures and keeping them alive is the only way to stop us from moving toward a world where we move through an endless monochrome.